The Iron Will of Shoeshine Cats

by Hesh Kestin

  At the time Shushan Cats came into my life I was seeing a girl named Celeste Callinan whom I’d met in advanced-Italian class at Brooklyn College. Celeste was one of those sweet-tempered outer-borough girls Henry Miller liked to write about: pliant of will, strawberry of hair, and so loudly orgasmic she must have frightened the neighbors, Hasidic Jews so modest about things sexual that, despite spawning dozens of kids, husbands and wives never saw each other in the nude. Celeste had no such hang-ups, possibly because unlike the Hasidim she could neutralize her sins at the nearest corner church for the price of a mea culpa and three Hail Marys, ten if the priest was gay. Celeste was so active I barely had to do anything but show up, and she had the delightful habit of bringing food, usually pizza or lo mein, Brooklyn’s two major food groups. That I was circumcised probably added to her love for me, and love it was. I discovered this, first to my gratification (who doesn’t want to inspire love?) and then my outright horror (who wants a woman who won’t go away?) when I was ready to move on. I was twenty years old and male, for crying out loud, and half the population of the five boroughs was demonstratively female. It wasn’t so much that I wasn’t ready to settle down—it was that I wasn’t ready for anything but the most extreme variety. Keeping Celeste at bay while I continued my gynecological researches had become a full-time job. At first I found her waiting on my stoop. Then she graduated from Stalking 101: she had stolen a copy of my key, so she could get into my apartment at any time unless I used the iron security bar to double-lock the door when I was home. When I wasn’t I kept finding someone waiting for me, which is just what occurred when I walked down Eastern Parkway with a funeral on my mind, and let myself in.

  Maybe I was too much involved with figuring out how to arrange for the eternal rest of Shushan Cats’ mother. As soon as I closed the door behind me I tried immediately to open it again. A large foot attached to a policeman pushed it shut. I wasn’t really afraid of the police, no more than any other white kid in New York at the time, but I had reason to fear this particular cop.

  Like the other two men in the room, he had Celeste’s strawberry hair, brightly freckled skin and, it turned out, the same enthusiasm for robust physical activity. All of them were big—and bigger together.

  The cop didn’t speak first. In fact, I don’t remember him speaking at all. It was the priest, whose words were soft, unthreatening, understated and cut off by the fireman, who got in the first punch. After that it was every New York Casanova’s nightmare: three Irish older brothers taking turns. By the time they left I not only hated myself for having banged their sister, but personally regretted the entire Irish potato famine that had sent the United States of America an emigration that really, really hurt.

  3.

  By noon the next day I managed to limp to the bathroom, survey the external damage, and piss blood. Standing in the grotty shower for a half hour, I let the hot water do its job while my mind slowly tried to crank like an engine that was all but seized. Little by little I came to realize the problem was not Celeste and her brothers—their work was done—but Shushan Cats, who was expecting a funeral. If he didn’t get his, I might very well get mine. It is amazing how fear can energize the exhausted.

  But it wasn’t just adrenalin that was flowing through me: it was, I was surprised to note, alacrity. By the time I was able to get down a cup of instant coffee with enough sugar in it to float a spoon—and then throw it up: more blood—I had formulated a plan. In the Yellow Pages I chose the largest ad. Even dialing hurt—this was a time when making a phone call was a physical activity. “I’m calling for Mr. Shushan Cats. His mother died yesterday and he wants you to make the arrangements.”

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” the man on the other end said. “Who?”

  “Shoeshine Cats, the gangster.”

  “The one in the papers?”

  “No, the one whose pointy-toe shoe is going to be buried up your ass if you don’t pay attention.”

  Then I called Feivel.

  “Russ,” he said. “I can’t talk to you now. I have a patient.”

  “Strangle him,” I said. “Feivel, Frank, whoever you are today, I need you to call Beth David, arrange for a plot with a sign on it that says Cats, and a hole big enough for Shushan’s mama, plus bring every member that can show up.”

  “I have a patient.”

  “Fine,” I said, and as I did noticed that one of my own teeth was a bit wobbly. “I’ll tell our grieving friend you’re too busy for his mother’s eternal rest, and I’ll give him your address.”

  “What are you talking, Russ? This is not something for a dentist.”

  “I’m not addressing you as a dentist. I’m addressing you as president of the Bhotke Young Men’s. You wanted the job?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “But nothing. You got it. Believe me, Rubashkin or Robinson or whatever, if you fuck with me Shushan Cats and company are going to fuck with you. If you’re lucky they’ll break your hands so you can’t make a living. If you’re less lucky you’ll have a new career—”

  “What kind of—”

  “As a soprano. You want Shushan to make you into Christine Jorgensen?”

  That did it. Christine Jorgensen was the first American male to have a sex change. An icon of the fifties, she was famous as “The man who went abroad and came back a broad.” Even the Daily Mirror, the most sensational tabloid of the day, did not have to exaggerate the headline on its front page: EX-GI BECOMES BLONDE BEAUTY. Instinctively I knew that when you make a threat, it helps to provide a visual. And this hoodlum wisdom was only from shaking Shushan Cats’ hand. It was a hell of an intense shake.

  By the next day I had stopped pissing blood and managed to hold down soup and toast, though on the subway to Beth David the condition of my face caused strangers to stare. I was now forced to rely on public transportation: not content to bust up my body and apartment, the brothers Callinan had as well played Erin go bragh on my car, a big-finned 1957 Plymouth Belvedere convertible that had seen better days but still, before the coming of the Fenians, had a roof, window glass, head and tail lights and unslashed tires. I was however less concerned with property than with body and soul, with emphasis on body. Almost certainly I had a couple of nicely cracked ribs, both on the right—the brothers Callinan were southpaws—where at least bone could not splinter off and puncture my heart. But my ribs were probably damaging something: parts of my body were announcing themselves to which I had never been formally introduced. To make matters worse, it had just begun to rain.

  As I walked quickly down the main road of the cemetery a red 1963 Cadillac Eldorado Biarritz convertible, top of the line—in that year the car cost $7500, annual take-home pay for a successful lawyer—braked hard and its four-foot wide door flew open like the wing of some giant cardinal. In the driver’s seat was the large man with the pencil mustache, this time in a dark gray suit and a large black hat, and beyond him his employer, who said something I couldn’t hear.

  “He says get in the car, dummy,” the large man said. This was a nice enough meatball whom, I was to learn, everyone called Ira-Myra’s, because of his wife, one of those lush Brooklyn beauties whose body could stop a parade, and whose name was always on Ira’s lips: Myra this, Myra that. The big lug was so helplessly in love it was cute, except that he was also maniacally jealous. Maybe a parade would have stopped for Myra, but everyone in Shushan’s circle made it a point not even to look in her general direction. For all practical purposes, the combination of her shape and Ira’s jealousy made her all but invisible, a striking woman who could enter a room and be totally ignored by every man in it.

  Ira-Myra’s leaned forward and the front seat canted open for me to climb in. Before I could say thanks I found myself swallowing hard: I was seeing a ghost. There on the back seat was none other than an excellent facsimile of Marie-Antonetta Provenzano, an older version for sure, but from the same maker.

  Shushan turned in his vanilla-leather seat. “It’s my sister, E
sther.”

  That was what he meant to say: I heard “Smy sista, Esta.” Shushan’s English took some getting used to, although even in my dampened, surprised and generally beat-the-shit-out-of state I could make out there was something wrong with it, like a stage-Irish brogue or one of those no-tickee-no-shirtee accents that are too heavy even for Chinatown. Despite my condition I almost wanted to answer him in kind: Plizd, ahmshore. Instead I said, “You look like someone I used to know.”

  Shushan turned around again. “Not if I can help it. Esther, this is Russy the college boy. Knows everything, can’t keep his mouth shut but is so far doing okay. He arranged for mama.”

  Esther looked intently at me while I looked at her. On closer examination she was not Marie-Antonetta, but might have been if Marie-Antonetta had had something going on behind those liquid brown eyes aside from food, make-up and grindingly slow dancing. This version had the same hair but cut short, pixieish à la Zizi Jeanmaire, the French dancer, not piled on top of her head, a petite face dusted discretely with rust powder over deeply tanned skin and heavily-shadowed eyes that made her seem at once alert and somnolent, and small, rounded lips like fish, one above the other and each facing a different way so that her mouth appeared pursed in silence yet pregnant with some phrase designed to hit me where Celeste’s brothers had missed. “You’re just a kid,” she said. From her standpoint that was true: she was younger than her brother, but had a good ten years on me.

  “Yeah.” I would have said yes to anything. But I couldn’t leave it at that. “Like you.”

  “Yes,” she said. “Like me.” With that she started to cry so hard it was all I could do to keep from putting my arm around her, and I might have done so, but we were already pulling up to the Bhotke Society subdivision, a barren neighborhood with a few headstones and a lot of discrete markers to indicate room for the inevitable depopulation explosion.

  What we had come to wasn’t a funeral. It was a collection of crowds. At my father’s funeral there couldn’t have been more than twenty. Here there seemed to be two hundred, standing in clumps as though representing a broad array of conflicting ideologies in some politically unstable republic. Probably there had not been so many people for a funeral in Beth David since Louis Gelb, the loan shark, died suddenly and his debtors, according to the Daily Mirror, showed up to make sure. (I read the New York Times and the Herald Tribune every day as well, but that was merely citizenship: in the tabloids was all the stuff that would be on the final.) Quickly I ran around the rear of the car and helped Esther out, watching her heel sink into the soft ground like a signet ring into warm wax. She hung on my arm as though we had been friends for a long time, but aside from the heady smell of her—not perfume but some sort of musk rising from her dark helmet of hair—I barely felt the incipient lust that was my companion night and day, and which was neither subtle nor discriminating. Perhaps it was my sore body, or the presence of the dead, or her brother, or all these people.

  The main group, standing around the grave with its back to the plot of the American Fellows of Gompitz, were familiar faces from the society, sixty at least, with Feivel/Franklin standing in front looking athletically despondent, like a sprinter who has once again come in last, and with him a generic rabbi, probably supplied by the funeral home, whose representative stood on his other side, all shiny suit, morose expression and pecuniary interest. Like the rabbi, a small man with a white goatee and a homburg, the mortician was what he was.

  I realized instantly that Shushan Cats, like any mourner, probably did not know what to do. With Esther on one arm I collected Shushan as he stepped out of the car on the other side and brought them to where the trio of officials stood before the grave.

  “Are these the children?” the rabbi asked. He muttered something in Hebrew and then, out of nowhere, in his hand appeared a blade.

  In retrospect it could hardly have taken minutes for what was to transpire, though it seemed to: the birds stopped singing, the wind stopped blowing, even the crisp November sunlight seemed to dim as I saw it all as if in a dream, the unrelentingly slow this-is-happening-but-is-not-happening union of fear and wonder that leaves us all as mute as an audience at a concert where the soloist falls off the stage or like an eyewitness at an accident as one car slowly, inevitably hurtles into another. But in dreams and concert halls and on highways we are never this close: Ira-Myra’s stepping forward from behind his boss, his thick arm in a perfect right cross pushing his open hand almost lyrically to seize the rabbi’s, the big man’s fingers wrapping the rabbi’s wrist, pushing it up and then down and around until the rabbi was on his knees, Ira-Myra’s’s own knee poised over him for the kind of kick that would have buried the rabbis’ white goatee in his own teeth.

  There they stood, frozen, a tableau waiting for resolution, until someone shouted, “Whoa—it’s just the rending of garments. Let him go!”

  Along with everyone else’s Ira-Myra’s’s eyes moved to the speaker. I followed their gaze. They were looking at me.

  Me?

  How did this happen? Only two days before I was spending my days in happy fornication and my nights too, in between smoking the odd joint, going out with friends to hear jazz in the Village—for months I was a regular at a dive called The Showplace, where the angrily percussive bassist Charlie Mingus once fired the piano player in mid-set, saying “We have suffered a diminuendo in personnel”—or drinking irresponsibly with a series of young women whose names and embraces run together like a medley of old songs, and from time to time visiting Brooklyn College where my professors allowed me to skip classes as an honor student so that I could spend time in a carrel at the library researching Milton or Mark Twain or Melville, so that I could deliver papers at term’s end and within one more term graduate. And do what? I didn’t know. I did know I spent as little time at the library as possible, but somehow delivered A-papers that I wrote a week before the end of the term, tossing in footnotes, a good many fictional, like some mad chef spicing a dish before it went into the oven. Look here, I wanted to say now: this is not my funeral, not my place, not my bodyguard, not my rabbi, not my anything entirely.

  At least for the moment, Shushan relieved me of my burden. “Ira,” he said quietly. “Let the nice rabbi go. He’s supposed to cut my coat, not my throat.” He looked to me. “Also Esther’s?”

  This was out of my theological league.

  Helped to his feet by Ira-Myra’s, the rabbi nodded yes.

  Oddly, I seemed to be the only one shook by this pocket violence. Everyone around us merely looked on with the same respectful attention while the rabbi made a cut in Shushan’s left lapel as though from time to time it was normal for a rabbi to be wrestled to the ground by a mourner. The rabbi said a prayer in Hebrew, which Shushan clearly did not understand—he said “Amen” only when the rabbi translated it into English: “Blessed are Thou, Lord our God, Ruler of the universe, the true Judge.” He then did the same, making a smaller slit, on the very edge of Esther’s coat—careful so as not to offend a woman’s modesty even in the face of death, a rabbi normally takes pains to make a miniscule tear that threatens to reveal nothing—and then summarized the benediction: “Blessed be the true Judge.”

  Beyond that it was your normal garden-variety funeral, except when Shushan took me aside and pulled a sheaf of typed papers out of his vest pocket. “You done good,” he said.

  “I’m trying, Mr. Cats.”

  “Shushan. Could be more flowers.”

  “Shushan.” What was I supposed to say—next time?

  “I want you should read this.”

  “Now?”

  “Yeah, because otherwise you won’t be familiar with the words.”

  “I have to be familiar with the words?”

  “It’s the eulogy.”

  Sometimes time passes slowly, sometimes super-fast. Time was now making up for lost time. “The eulogy?”

  “I want you should read it.”

  It occurred to me that perhaps Shushan
was illiterate. Somebody had to read it. He couldn’t. So he chose me. Made perfect sense. “Maybe the rabbi would be a better choice. Or Feivel, the Bhotke president.” Or Walter Cronkite, or John F. Kennedy. Anyone. Just not me.

  “You’re the man.”

  “I never met your mother, Mr. Ca—Shushan. I mean, it would be... strange.”

  “I wrote it,” he said, “But I can’t read it.”

  “You wrote it.”

  “Sure,” he said. “It’s all true. She was a wonderful mother. She deserves a good reading.”

  “Me?”

  “Who else, Ira-Myra’s?”

  I looked at him. “You?”

  “Not me,” he said.

  Not him. “If you don’t mind my asking...”

  Shushan nodded in the direction of the Gerwitz Association real estate to our right where several groups of individuals hovered in bunches, as carefully arranged as battleground figurines, the sun glinting off their sunglasses and silk suits like so many search lights. A good forty were clearly goombahs, the kind Hollywood would shortly be making a stream of movies about, their names ending in vowels and their lives ending, it would seem, in either a bullet to the head or prison. These were not people who died in bed. Several feet away, standing in a clump of their own, were more of the same, thirty or so, but black, each one more elegant than the next in double-breasted black suits, bright white shirts, black ties, and on their heads broad brimmed black hats. The Italians were a mixed group, mostly older men in glasses and given to paunch, along with a sprinkling of muscular youngsters who were either their sons or their soldiers, or both. The blacks were rangy, big men who had gotten to where they were because they were handy with their fists. Further along, several yards separating them, stood a dozen or so Chinese, short, chubby, dressed straight out of Brooks Brothers’ window, none of them wearing hats, probably because not one had ever before been to a Jewish funeral. I watched the mortician walk up to them and hand them black skull-caps. Each examined the item, then placed it on his head so gingerly it was as if it might cause some sort of explosion.